Field Evaluation of a Wearable Instrumented Headband Designed for Measuring Head Kinematics

To study the relationship between soccer heading and the risk of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), we previously developed an instrumented headband and data-processing scheme to measure the angular head kinematics of soccer headers. Laboratory evaluation of the headband on an anthropomorphic test device showed good agreement with a reference sensor for soccer ball impacts to the front of the head. In this study, we evaluate the headband in measuring the full head kinematics of soccer headers in the field.

The headband was evaluated under typical soccer heading scenarios (throw-ins, goal-kicks, and corner-kicks) on a human subject. The measured time history and peak kinematics from the headband were compared with those from an instrumented mouthpiece, which is a widely accepted method for measuring head kinematics in the field.

The time-history agreement (CORA scores) between the headband and the mouthpiece ranged from 'fair' to 'excellent', with the highest agreement for angular velocities (0.79 ± 0.08) and translational accelerations (0.73 ± 0.05) and lowest for angular accelerations (0.67 ± 0.06). A Bland-Altman analysis of the peak kinematics from the headband and mouthpiece found the mean bias to be 40.9 $\%$ (of the maximum mouthpiece reading) for the angular velocity, 16.6 $\%$ for the translational acceleration, and -14.1 $\%$ for the angular acceleration.

The field evaluation of the instrumented headband showed reasonable agreement with the mouthpiece for some kinematic measures and impact conditions. Future work should focus on improving the headband performance across all kinematic measures.